Before Dollars, There Were Cows

The root of the word pecuniary—meaning “pertaining to money”—is the Latin word pecus, which means cattle. In Latin, the forms pecunia and pecuniarus also exist; pecunia came to mean “money,” but it initially meant “riches in cattle.”

A similar development may have happened with Old English feoh (where the ‘h’ is pronounced like the ‘ch’ in the Scottish work loch), which is one of the possible origins of our modern English word fee.